National City, CA Business Licensing & Operations: Pawnbrokers (2026)

Section 18.30.320 of the National City Land Use Code (Title 18) covers pawn shops and businesses engaged in secondhand dealing or in purchasing and selling gold and other precious metals. The glossary defines a pawn shop as a business that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as collateral.

The location rules are numeric. No such business can be located within two thousand feet of another one, and none can sit closer than two hundred fifty feet from a residential zone. None can be located east of Interstate 805. The spacing rule and the Interstate 805 rule do not apply to shopping centers of fifty thousand square feet or more. On top of the spacing, no more than six pawn shops are allowed within National City.

Licensing has two layers. A police permit is required, and its processing must comply with Business and Professions Code Section 21641. The chief of police charges a nonrefundable fee, or the required renewal fee, to cover the costs of processing the police permit and the actual costs of processing the application and of collecting and transmitting the fee charged by the state department of justice. Separately, all pawnbrokers and secondhand dealers need at minimum a secondhand dealer license and must follow state-mandated reporting requirements for secondhand tangible personal property under the Business and Professions Code. Those requirements also apply to retail businesses that offer trade-ins or credit for secondhand tangible personal property, so a store that buys used goods on trade cannot treat itself as outside the rule.

A pawn shop or secondhand dealer that also provides payday lending is not exempt from the city's payday lender regulations, which sit in the next section, § 18.30.330. The Land Use Code's business tax schedule separately lists a pawnbroker line, so operators face both a zoning approval and a business tax license.